As diplomatic fires burned in Venezuela, China, and Saudi Arabia last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was touring Iowa and lining up visits to Texas and Kansas, his home state. The spate of domestic travel, and the apparent focus on crucial battleground states, has not gone unnoticed in Foggy Bottom. Is Pompeo, a former congressman and Koch network favorite, laying roots for a 2024 run? Or, more ambitiously, is the Trump sycophant positioning himself to swoop up Donald Trump’s base for a 2020 bid, should the president get impeached or indicted?

Diplomats I spoke with were bewildered. One State Department official said they were “baffled somewhat” by Secretary Pompeo’s travel itinerary. Another lamented the timing. “So much going on around the world, and [he’s] traveling in the U.S.—weird,” they told me. “Pompeo clearly has political ambition beyond being such a pathetic Secretary of State,” said John Weaver, a longtime Republican political operative who serves as adviser to former Ohio governor John Kasich. “He was a backbench House member till he was plucked by Trump’s band of low travelers, so I’m sure he now has the taste of what success could be. Hard to see him play politically beyond the borders of Kansas though.” Rick Wilson, another longtime G.O.P. strategist, and, like Weaver, a Never Trumper, echoed the sentiment. “Like a number of other people in Trump’s orbit, he’s trying to look past the current moment, keep the Trump base thinking he’s a true believer, and set himself up for the future,” he said.

The State Department has provided a convenient purpose for each visit: the trip to Iowa was ostensibly to recruit “millions of Americans outside the Boston-D.C. corridor” to serve at State, and to give a series of speeches about American agriculture and exports. In Texas, Pompeo will attend an energy conference, and, in Kansas, the secretary is scheduled to address a global entrepreneurship summit. “The first client of the State Department is the American people,” State Department spokesperson Robert Palladino said in a statement to CNN. “The secretary believes it is important to speak directly to the American people to explain how the work of diplomats around the world contributes to their safety, security, and prosperity.” Pompeo himself flatly dismissed the notion that his itinerary has political motivations, calling the suggestion “ridiculous.”

Pompeo’s predecessors certainly visited various states during their tenures. A second former high-ranking State official told me that it has “been done in the past,” and offered that “other secretaries have tried to gear domestic trips to specific policy issues or trips,” or “have undertaken domestic travel in response to specific members of Congress who asked them to visit their State/district.” But official explanations have fallen flat in corners of the Harry S. Truman Building and among veterans of the State Department. As this person added, Pompeo’s “sudden surge of domestic travel to the heartland” seems “a bit off-key or jarring.” “He sent around an update about the trip and it was interesting but it still seemed a bit confusing in terms of a purpose,” the first State Department official said. “The comment about needing more F.S.O.s from the heartland: reaction was, ‘Right, because we don’t have enough white people,’ and, ‘He went to Harvard, so don’t act like he is some populist,’” said a former high-ranking State Department official who is still in touch with former colleagues. “Having failed at every bit of diplomacy that matters for our actual national security, makes sense to go spend time at 4-H in Iowa.”

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Pompeo’s political ambition has never really been in question. His career includes degrees from the U.S. Military Academy and Harvard Law School. He served for six years in the House of Representatives before leading the C.I.A. and then taking over at State. All that’s uncertain, it seems, is the timing. While Trump’s 2020 campaign has kicked into gear, Robert Mueller’s imminent Russia report and an oversight-hungry Democratic House raise questions about whether the president will be on the ballot in the next election. Much like Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Pompeo has managed to tactfully navigate Trumpworld. His obsequiousness to the president, despite their incongruent demeanors, might position him to absorb Trump’s disaffected MAGA base. “My gut tells me that Pompeo is definitely planning on running for something at some point. I think he is too young and too bright a star right now in the Republican Party for that not to be the case,” a former administration official told me. “I definitely think most people in the administration already had the sense that Pompeo would be running for office again.” Earlier this year, Pompeo was reportedly floated as a potential Republican candidate to fill Kansas Senator Pat Roberts’s seat after he retires in 2020. Pompeo eventually shut down the idea, saying he had “ruled out” the possibility.

People who know him well, however, tell CNN that Pompeo wouldn’t say no to leading the Pentagon as secretary of defense—or taking over the presidency. “Secretary Pompeo’s trip to Iowa, and soon to be followed by his home state of Kansas—while on government plane, no less—has raised eyebrows in the White House and with outside advisers to the president,” a senior administration official told CNN. (As the former director of the C.I.A., one wonders what Pompeo might know about Mueller’s findings that the public is still waiting to learn.)

“I think the key will be: is this just a short spate of domestic travel,” or something more, wondered the second State Department official. One or two trips might be written off. But the optics begin to change if Pompeo keeps making “continued, frequent domestic trips over the next couple of months.” That, the official said, would “suggest to me that he is eyeing something else.”